


Reliquary

by DetournementArc



Category: Original Work
Genre: Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:35:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24963844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc





	Reliquary

The Dispensary juts out, clear and defined in its harsh form against a world worn smooth by the washing tides of nuclear ash and parched desert sand. In defiance of the ruins around it, it stands tall. In defiance of the blistering light of a morning sun, it is stark and tenebrous. In defiance of the graveyard world it seems to have been dropped into or sprung from as furies from the viscera of a scorned god, it lives. Its breaths animate the strange, harsh faces of its form, a Cubist lung hanging suspended in a haze soaked sky.

I trail massive pipes of what appears to be rusted steel, but invoke flesh as they pulsate like veins. They snake through the toppled concrete and skeletal girders of the ruins, piercing through whatever detritus they cannot wind around.

Finally, at the core of the city, I can feel sweat pooling in the corners of the rubberized protective suit that clings to my body, I can feel the sizzling radiation of this world trying to seep in like the bitterest cold patiently insinuating itself under the layers of the warmest coat. In my anticipation of the death that awaits my smallest mistake, I can imagine the burning so vividly that I fear I may not even notice when the real exposure symptoms will appear.

I know this is foolish. The few who have survived brushes with Exposure always say that you will Know. For the imagination cannot conjure such pains as those which the Aboveworld brings. Even the notions of God and Hell are fruit sprung of the human mind. The pain up here is older, not so merciful as to entertain you with divine fury or diabolical cruelty, it simply Burns, as it has always burned, and you simply die, as living things always have.

At that place where The Dispensary should have some base, there is some twenty feet of air and dust upon which its vast form simply sits with the stability of concrete. A moments pondering at the piping serving as some sort of support structure quickly disappears upon seeing how delicately draped they look, how they quiver and shake like reeds.

In the center of this massive tower's shadow sits a raised, stone plinth, beneath a small rectangular aperture in The Dispensary's underbelly, like a hopper waiting for something to be poured out from this impossibly dark chute.

Poured.

I recall reading how "God" and "Futile" both have their linguistic roots in an ancient word meaning "To Pour". Speculation was that whatever rituals those ancient peoples took on saw the pouring of substance as a sacred rite. I could find something Holy here, or something meaningless. The sheer darkness in that portal seemed to gleefully hang out to that ambiguity, relishing my desperation.

Finally, the stars aligned as prophecized, the radioactive decay matching the projections that served as a calendar to us subterranean people's orphaned from the light of our moon, our stars, our sun.

A tumbling, clanging cacophony rung out, almost inaudible from deep within The Dispensary.

The Relic has fallen.


End file.
